Clearing hung programs

If programs hang while doing file-related work, your NFS server may be dead. You may see the following message on your console:

   NFS server hostname not responding, still trying

• If your machine hangs completely, check the server(s) from which you mounted the resource. If one or more are down, do not be concerned. When the server comes back up, programs resume automatically. No files are destroyed if the resource was hard mounted (see ``Hard and soft mounts'').

• If you soft-mount a resource and the server dies, other work should not be affected. Programs that time out trying to access soft mounted remote files will fail with errno ETIMEDOUT, but you should still be able to access other resources.

• If all servers are running, ask someone else using these same servers if they are having trouble. If more than one machine is having problems getting service, there is a problem with the server:

  1. Log in to the server.

  2. Use nfsping -o nfsd to see if nfsd is running.

  3. Enter ps -ef | grep nfsd a few times to see if nfsd is accumulating CPU time (let some time pass between each call).

  4. If it is not accumulating CPU time, you may be able to kill and then restart nfsd. If this does not work, you have to reboot the server.

  5. If nfsd is not running, it may be that the server has been taken to an init state that does not support file sharing. Use who -r to obtain the server's current init state.

  If other systems seem to be up and running, check your network connection and the connection of the server.

• If programs on the client are hung but the server is up, NFS requests to the server other than reads and writes are succeeding, and messages of the form
  
  xdr_opaque: encode FAILED

  are appearing on either the client or the server console, you may be requesting more data than the underlying transport provider can provide. Try remounting the filesystem using the -o rsize=nnn,wsize=nnn options to mount to restrict the request sizes the client will generate. The maximum rsize and wsize, which is also the default, is 8 KB.